Leveraging GPU accelerator processors from NVIDIA that now run on the same motherboard as IBM Power8 processors, IBM today unveiled IBM Power S824L servers that it says provide nearly 20 percent better price and performance than comparable machines based on Intel Xeon processors.

In addition, IBM today is extending the line of Power Enterprise Systems it introduced last spring. Capable of running AIX, IBM i, or multiple distributions of the Linux operating system, the new Power E870 and Power E880 Systems feature 192 processor cores capable of supporting 1,500 threads of compute power. Based on the choice of 32 or 48 cores per node, the Power E880 can also be configured with up to128 cores to provide 1,028 threads of compute power. Both configurations are available with up to 16TB of memory.

Ken King, general manager for OpenPOWER Alliances for IBM, says a key part of the IBM Power strategy is the recent addition of support for Little Endian byte ordering, which makes it much easier to port applications running on Intel x86 processors to IBM Power server platforms. IBM is also creating what it describes as Power Enterprise Pools, which allow customers to dynamically scale compute resources across a pool of systems.

Finally, IBM also introduced two new appliances. An IBM Data Engine for Analytics – Power Systems Edition appliance combines Power8 systems with IBM’s flash-based Elastic Storage technology and high-performance computing (HPC) software from the IBM’s Platform Computing unit. An IBM Data Engine for NoSQL appliance combines Power System S822L servers with IBM FlashSystem 840, Ubuntu Linux and Redis Software. Configured with 40TB of Flash memory, IBM says this appliance can be used to replace 24 separate Intel servers with one POWER8 server.